lately

sorry to disappear just after i finally started blogging pretty regularly.

what's been happening?

-bert and ivy had a beautiful wedding reception just last evening; i also got to see my fantastic friend ed for the first time in months. we ate, we all danced, we drank many beers (err...whiskeys in my case). just wish britto had been here as well.

-i'm days away from (alas, finally) a rough draft of my dissertation prospectus.

-our house is a wreck because: i'm writing, brian's writing, i typically forget to clean when i'm stressed out, and our dishes have dish babies. i'm convinced of this last part; they multiply.

-i've decided i'm the opposite of moderate.

-i've very recently learned that if you finally let go of something you've been needing to for ages, it's like tearing open a package of cookies you've really wanted to devour. as in...once you've lept from the proverbial cliff, you find yourself wondering why it took so damn long to jump. because the water's warm and welcoming in this metaphor...it's been waiting for you, and there's lots of ocean to cover.

-my birthday is in about a week. i'll be 25. that scares me a little. i'm having no party and no celebration this year. i kind of want it to pass by quietly like a thief in the night.

-i'll be traveling to louisville for the southern historical association meeting in about two weeks. and then home to shreveport for turkey day.

-that's all i got on a lethargic sunday. sorry. but not really.

what. peace out.

make me a music genius

So, yeah, I come late to every great new music discovery...however subjective you think "great" is (but don't bother me with that nonsense).

Examples galore: I came three years late to the metaphorical Neko Case party (and I met all her boyfriends at the same time)/I obsessed over the Vampire Weekend album and that damn Walcott song at least a year after my fellow Athenites did (my pal Tim reminded me of this the other day with a teasing smile)/and right now I'm drowning in Bonnie "Prince" Billy's entire gravelling catalogue in a haze of almost-tears (thanks to some late-night sampling on the porch of an old house and now my own curious volition).

A solution to this madness? Well, Pandora helped. But I'm so old-fashioned. I listen to Pandora at the office and then scribble the recommendations on an old piece of notebook paper. And then every other time I do this, I lose the little paper in question and those songs are lost to me again. Yesterday, though, I finally downloaded itunes Genius for my laptop.

I'm finally relatively modern, when it comes to my music at least. I spent four hours downloading album artwork and arranging my Genius "mixes" (similar to what Pandora does, just matching up songs that go together). It's a money-making venture on Apple's part, I get that (they run a sidebar to any song you're listening to, recommending further purchases from the itunes store), but it's also a more seamless connection between my music library and everything that might be going on in and around it in the vast music ether. And visualizing all the albums I own stacked up against one another is an interesting image to say the least...like taking a journey back to each step I made in my musical education. I deleted some embarrassing items/I cried, cried with some songs I hadn't been brave enough to listen to in ages/and I reveled in some new choices that make me feel like I'm letting go and moving forward at exactly the same instant.

Maybe now I'll be a tad, tad bit cooler.

Above is my current numberoneoneone rec!

emotional blogging

It's Saturday. I'm on my third cup of coffee. Autumn has found us. The football team is in Tennessee (so far doing quite poorly), so Athens is quieter right now than most fall weekends. I drove to Atlanta last night with one of my best friends to see Kings of Leon play an arena show. I know, right? The songs didn't translate to such a venue, but that didn't stop my head from bobbing uncontrollably when the building shook during "Sex on Fire." We sat behind a set of high school twin boys who'd each brought an adorable date; for a brief moment, I think I wanted to go back and relive my early, early youth. You know...those weekends when all that really matters is that you've done your homework, and your mother might make pancakes for breakfast with blueberries on top. Not that life was ever, ever like that in my house anyway. Eh, sigh.

So how does one write a blog? Should it be distinctly political? Like, do I support Obama's Nobel win. I don't know what I think about any of that anymore. I'm not sure that I quite care, or if I ever have. I've turned to referencing biting Gore Vidal quotes when students and friends want to chat about American democracy. It doesn't exist in the way we want to believe it does, people. We are a nation of misdistribution, plain and simple.

Or is a blog about the meaning of life? Maybe I should take ten photos every day and post them, describe them, contextualize them within my life and my hopes and dreams. Would they mean anything to others, though? Or is that a selfish way to record the minute details of my everyday existence?

I've settled on emotional blogging, which bothers some people, I think. When I sit down to write, my fingers are capable of little else than frenetic, erratic transmission. A poem I remember, or a song I can't get out of my head...what do those things make me feel? Lately, as any of you who've followed this wandering business closely know, I've communicated much confusion and sadness concerning the nature of unhealthy relationships as I try to conquer them and move on from them. I lay myself bare here, for anyone who notices, and I've just recently realized that I'm confident in doing so. This blog is a fully adequate representation of ME--an emotional, analytical, heavily feeling person who struggles everyday to make sense of the people and the events and even the tiny movements going on around her. I'm an average twenty-something in so many ways--a student, single, living in a tiny bungalow with one of my best friends, eating a lot of pasta and daydreaming about better places and bigger plans. But what makes me different is how I communicate all of that--through the written word, through this modern device called a blog, in abstract phrasings and emotional outbursts.

Do I get scared sometimes that people I know (some I love, some I kind of don't) are reading this and might even become slightly disconcerted that something they read concerns them? Yeah, it's made me nervous before. But frankly...I just don't give a damn anymore. Read, people, make your judgments. And if you have a reaction, express it. Tell me, talk to me, feel it.

Reading today: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (the same copy I bought and read when I was fifteen years old)

Listening to: Bonnie Prince Billy

Observing: Brian pace around the house, watching the game, shuffling, saying funny things, making me realize I am surrounded by wonderful people

I say sorry

I say bye bye

I say miss you

I say cry cry

///////

I like the places where the night

does not mean an end

where smiles break free

and surpirse is your friend

and dancing goes on in the kitchen

until dawn

to my favorite song

that has no end

a poem//thursday

One Art//Elizabeth Bishop

(This is probably my favorite poem. Ruined a teensy bit by its appearance in a poorly made Cameron Diaz film adapted from a chick lit novel? Eh, no, not really :).)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day.

Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.

And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.

And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.--

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

(The poem popped into my head this morning as I drank my first cup of coffee. The last four or five lines here helped me years ago when I lost my mom; funny and moving and scary how a small cluster of words can make you feel better, feel comforted. They helped me again this week as I figured something very different out. "A gesture I love"...like a laugh, or your reading voice, the chopping of an onion, or the leaning of a shoulder...how powerful to think that these are the things we love about people. It's kind of beautiful.)

A great Thursday to you all.

today i let ten things go.

1) a pair of blue linen pants that fit me better than any other pair of pants i have ever owned. i tried for months to ignore the bright pink stain (the result of a fallen cough-drop) on their right leg. but i couldn't anymore. thank you for three years of good service, pants.

2) a stack of old students papers. from three years ago. these students have probably graduated. and they certainly have long decided to NOT contest their grade in history 2112.

3) the fear i had of hanging my mother's favorite ceramic cross in my bedroom. i had it sitting by the bedroom door for two months here at the new house. present, but not prioritized. i think i was scared of what people might think. but i know what religious symbolisms mean for me, and they probably don't mean exactly that for anyone else. that's okay, and it's also okay if i'm re-finding my quest for some higher power and higher meanings in my life.

4) money. today i caught up on all of my bills.

5) my summer dresses. they've been vamoooosed to higher shelves. it's autumn, there's a chill in the air and a bite in my step, and so i've pulled down the sweaters. secrets sleep in winter clothes, you know.

6) the illusion that my hair can ever really be straightened.

7) a little sadness. i've had too much of it lately, taken far more than my fair share. and it's mostly my fault. no one can MAKE you sad; my worst villains are my own meandering thoughts.

8) all the old food in our fridge. we need to pay closer to attention to what's far back in those plastic drawers...ew.

9) parts of myself that are old and worn. there are so many, swimming all around. it's baby steps, baby steps, like bill murray in what about bob? ("look, i'm saiiiiling!)

10) some of the fear of moving forward.

i'm bringin' wellies back/or...tore and kelli get married

there's a downward view of my fantastic blue wellies as i gazed upon them last night. yes, i gazed at my feet. imagine this: about a dozen women (men not as big into wellies i find) dancing atop dirt and haphazard piles of hay, in their respective wellies of various colors. and i never imagined that i'd be comfortable enough to wear raingear with a fancy dress for the entire duration of a wedding celebration. but that's the way tore and kelli set up this shindig. this was a wedding where everyone felt very comfortable. this was a wedding celebrating their love but also their friendships with those around them. we drank home brews and pomegranite mead, devoured local pork shoulder and salsa and black beans, and watched as two families became one. somewhere around midnight, as a handful of really sweaty people continued to dance to early 90s pop music and showed no signs of stopping doing so, i felt myself literally jumping up and down to the beat of the pulse of the air (whatever you can call it, the very atmosphere i guess) around me.

i've been a bit cynical about weddings in the past. my sister's broke me of this completely earlier this year, when i saw the love and pride in her eyes. and i think this one last night really made me understand why weddings are so important. they're for the couple, yes, of course, but they're also so much for the families to fit together. find their place together, and to--quite literally--join their hands together. it's a benchmark, a red-letter. and we all felt lucky to be there for it.

cheers forever to tore and kelli--two of the most creative, intelligent, compassionate, and lovely people i know.

eye candy thursday: mini-analysis

so, if you haven't figured this out yet, my eye candy thursdays are completely impulsive, immature, and have thus far involved only one person: a mr. robert pattinson. i won't call him a heartthrob, because he (well it seems to me, anyway) is much too thoughtful, potentially intellectual, and hipster messy-sexy-grimy to fall into that category.

i don't support paparrazzi photos or how they get them, but hell, he looks so casual and sauntering in this one that i imagine the photogs weren't being too intrusive at the time.

a few thoughts:

1) don't drink bottled water, dude. fiji water probably actually comes from alabama. bottled water will eventually kill us all; collective bottled-water hoarding will turn our backyards into landfills and vice-versa. i mean, it's elementary.

2) starbucks' pastries? (what else could be in that bag?) really? gross.

3) is that jacket etienne aigner? maybe even vintage. it's quite beautiful.

4) dear faded black jeans: keep working your magic.